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Interpretive Community: AnApproach to Media and ReligionThomas R. LindlofVersion of record first published: 13 Nov 2009.

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Interpretive Community:An Approach to Media and Religion

Thomas R. LindlofSchool of Journalism and Telecommunications

University of Kentucky, andEditor of the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media

The last 20 years have been a time of enormous change in the religious scene. Ameri-cans’ religious affiliations are more diverse than ever, and their beliefs and valuesmore varied (Eck, 2001; Gallup, Gallup, & Lindsay, 2000; Kosmin & Lachman,1993). Religious institutions have become more responsive to people’s needs andlifestyles (Cimino&Lattin,1998;Roof,1999), turning to suchstrategiesas theuseof“contemporary” elements in worship and small group programs to treat thelife-course issues of members. The last two decades also witnessed the nationalpoliticization of many church and para-church organizations—most vividly seen inthe “culture war” waged over abortion, art, and media—which, by the mid-1990s,had turned toward grassroots initiatives on the homefront (Diamond, 1998).

These developments are signs of an emerging voluntaristic mode of spiritual in-volvement. According to sociologist Nancy T. Ammerman (1997), this orienta-tion—characterized by fluid and plural modes of commitment, diverse styles of wor-ship, and “portable” religious practices that find their way into the wider society—requires a new conceptual lens for social scientific study. Arguing that either–or cat-egories like “sacred–secular,” “tradition–modernity,” and “member–nonmember”are no longer useful, Ammerman urges scholars to “imagine ways of describing themuch more complicated reality we encounter in a world where actors are constantlychoosing their ways of being religious” (p. 204). This objective in turn should lead tostudies that ask “how religious rhetorics and practices are enacted and how they aresituated in various organizational contexts” (p. 205). The “new paradigm” she out-lines (seealsoWarner,1993) involves the Janus-faced taskof lookingbothat local re-ligious communities and the globe-spanning discourses that influence people’schoices for action and belief.

JOURNAL OF MEDIA AND RELIGION, 1(1), 61–74Copyright © 2002, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Requests for reprints should be sent to Thomas R. Lindlof, 212 Grehan Journalism Building 0042,University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506. E-mail: lindlof@pop.uky.edu

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Accompanying the recent changes in organized religion was the rapid growth ofa commercial media sector. Religiously inflected cultural products valued in thebillions of dollars are now produced and distributed by publishers, bookstores, re-corded music divisions, video companies, television networks, and other mediacompanies. Many of these products are targeted solely for the evangelical Christianmarket, but a growing number of them—for example, contemporary Christian mu-sic; novels such as the hugely successful Left Behind series; movies made by Chris-tian film companies (Ferguson & Lee, 1997; Romanowski, 2001; Spencer, 2001)—demonstrate crossover appeal to a broader consumer base. Even the mainstreamentertainment industry is taking the “faith market” more seriously than before,with overtly religious characters and themes featured in movies and primetimetelevision series.

Ammerman’s (1997) call for fresh thinking in the study of congregationalchange applies with equal force to the complex relations of media and religion.That is, communication researchers should ask how media rhetorics and practicesare enacted and how they are situated in various religious contexts. My purpose inthis article is to examine a specific brand of this inquiry—the interpretive communityapproach, which is one of several social-semiotic approaches to studying the mediaaudience that emerged in the 1980s and early 1990s (Hay, Grossberg, & Wartella,1996; Lindlof & Meyer, 1998; White, 1994). The interpretive community ap-proach has had a short, but provocative, life in media studies. Early on, the conceptwas the subject of intensive theorizing and debate, but without the benefit of muchempirical work. In recent years, however, studies have been published that use theidea of interpretive community to advance claims about the signifying practices ofmedia audiences. Many of these are found in the area of media and religion. Be-cause the notion of community is key to the concerns, history, and doctrines of mostreligious cultures, it should not be surprising that it resonates among many of thosewho study the role played by media in the social construction of religion.

This article begins with a focused survey of the interpretive community ap-proach, including its kinship with traditional ideas of community and critical viewsthat have been expressed about the approach. Next, I review the usage of the inter-pretive community in media studies, including applications in the area of mediaand religion. Many of these studies are highly suggestive of the interplay of mediatechnology and content, human agency, and faith community in a postmodernage. In the final section, I propose future directions for interpretive community re-search generally and in the contexts of religion and spirituality.

INTERPRETIVE COMMUNITY:THE SOCIAL NEXUS OF MEDIA USE

In the view of Plant (1978), community is a term that “plays a major legitimatingrole in our talk about institutions” (p. 81). For example, bureaucracy is often re-

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ferred to as a community (e.g., calling the Central Intelligence Agency part of theintelligence community) to imbue it with connotations of humanity, cooperation,and cohesiveness. Although community is a desideratum in everyday speech, itsdescriptive meanings are more complicated. As Plant noted, community can mean

locality; interest group; a system of solidarity; a group with a sense of mutual signifi-cance; a group characterized by moral agreement, shared beliefs, shared authority, orethnic integrity; a group marked by historical continuity and shared traditions; agroup in which members meet in some kind of total fashion as opposed to meeting asmembers of certain roles, functions, or occupational groups; and finally, occupa-tional, functional, or partial communities. (p. 82)

Despite this profusion of meanings, community can be characterized by a set ofelements across most cases. First, community is based on a unity of shared circum-stances, interests, customs, and purposes (although scholars disagree aboutwhether this is mostly a unity of sameness or unity in difference; Whitt & Slack,1994). When we recognize a social unit as community, we usually see strong evi-dence of efforts toward solidarity (even if we see other evidence of dispute, self-in-terest, or ideological fragmentation). Therefore, a successful community should be“capable of directing individual action towards the construction and maintenanceof goods that could not be created by individuals acting in isolation” (Smith, 1993,p. 10).

A second characteristic is the moral obligations that the members share, mani-fested in social rules, etiquette, and ethical codes. Inside and outside the commu-nity, moral performances are subject to the commentary, critique, sanction, andapproval of other agents (Calhoun, 1980).

Third, if unity and moral obligations are to form, a community must achieve sta-bility over time. This stability is usually aided by the establishment of sacred icons,canonical texts, rituals, and myths, whose symbolic potency for directing core val-ues outlasts the coming and going of individual generations of community mem-bers. Stable communities also rely on an adequate material base and favorable po-litical conditions.

Fourth, the social networks of community furnish the communicative occasionsand codes that enable social actors to coordinate their actions, and to know who isinside and who is outside the membership. In fact, it is only through the use of dis-cursive resources that an intersubjective basis for “doing community” can beachieved. In addition, Benedict Anderson’s (1991) thesis of the “imagined com-munity” tells us that there need not be dense, face-to-face relations for a felt senseof community to arise. With the spread of mass media and computer networks,ideas of national or diasporic community can become the basis for sensible identityperformances.

In the popular imagination of the 20th century, the mass media have posedconsiderable threat to the integrity of local community (J. Jensen, 1990). These

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threats are perceived as both structural (the media’s “privatization” of family andpolitics) and moral (the media’s production of content whose values are often atodds with local sources of moral authority). The interpretive community conceptbrings the trope of community to the microsocial level and provides a way toconsider the social formation of audiences in a more organic sense. The term it-self derives from recent literary theory, although other sources have been impor-tant—Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of dialogic, intertextual genres of communica-tion (see Lindlof, 1988); Charles Pierce’s pragmatist theory of semiotics (see K.B. Jensen, 1991); and the conceptualization of tactical resistance to political andcultural hegemony (Fiske, 1988). Simply put, an interpretive community is a col-lectivity of people who share strategies for interpreting, using, and engaging incommunication about a media text or technology. The strategies are devisedwith respect to norms and standards that evolve among the community membersthrough innovation and the influence of argument. More important, these“[strategies] proceed not from [the reader] but from the interpretive communityof which he is a member; they are, in effect, community property, and insofar asthey at once enable and limit the operations of his consciousness, he is too”(Fish, 1980, p. 14).

After more than 15 years, many aspects of the concept are still ambiguous andcontested. Due to the fact that most research efforts have depended on qualitativemethods to produce “exemplars” of individual interpretive communities, theorydevelopment has been slow and ad hoc. However, nearly all analysts agree on atleast a few propositions:

• At its core, an interpretive community is comprised of sets of discursive strat-egies (not people as such) that find their expression in tactical “readings” (orrewritings of text) by socially situated individuals or groups. “The individual in anystrategic situation is a local and partial representation of the interpretive commu-nity” (J. A. Anderson, 1996, p. 87). Membership in the community means that aperson performs media usage in ways that are recognizable and valued by others asthis type of action (and not something else).

• Although media discourses are structured in ways that favor the activation ofcertain audience discourses, the individual text always has a polysemic potential.“The text becomes a site of contested interpretations with different audience com-munities producing different sense-making achievements” (J. A. Anderson &Meyer, 1988, p. 314). Further, the text can produce meanings in vivo only in relationto the audience’s knowledge and valuation of other texts and social institutions.

• Communities vary in terms of how intentional and self-conscious they are.Some interpretive communities are public, self-consciously named (and promoted),and more or less stable (e.g., Kentucky Wildcat fans); whereas others are more elu-sive, less intentional, and less available to public inspection. On the whole, interpre-tive communities based in media competencies may be less stable over time than tra-ditional communities.

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• Interpretive communities are most easily identified as an audience for agenre. As discussed later in this article, genre is a site for negotiation between con-tent producers and consumers. However, interpretive communities can also formas outgrowths of preexisting groupings, such as a religious community (e.g., Luthra,2001) in which case content serves as a resource for identity grounded in spiritualworldview or ethos. The religious community may even develop interpretive strat-egies for avoiding or restricting media use (e.g., Lepter & Lindlof, 2001; Stout,Scott, & Martin, 1996).

• Interpretive communities are multiple, overlapping, and potentially contra-dictory (K. B. Jensen, 1991). The sort of unity seen in face-to-face community is of-ten absent in the media-based communities. For example, one can simultaneouslyenter the worlds of parental community (adopting “approved” methods to regulatechild viewing), peer community (going to the sports bar on weekends), and politi-cal community (reading people’s political persuasions from the bumper stickers ontheir cars).

The industrial production of media content sets boundaries on what can be saidor thought about it (and this is true for even the most radically socialized of com-munities). At the same time, most such content is engineered for wide-ranging in-terpretations. For example, to the extent that a television program represents thecultural mainstream of a society, the more likely it is read similarly by all audiencemembers. Each person inhabits different life worlds that call for competencies and“reality scripts” for coordinating meanings with others (Schoening & Anderson,1995). As people shift their purposes from scene to scene, the meanings of contentare read differently. It is the dynamic process of interpretation in specific situationsthat matters in the making of meanings (Machin & Carrithers, 1996; Schroder,1994). Therefore, media texts are the products of the strategies that they partici-pate in creating.

The interpretive community approach to media—particularly in audience stud-ies—has been criticized on several grounds. The most common criticism is the al-leged lack of historical, cultural, and social context in both theory and research(Carragee,1990).According to thiscritique, interpretivist theoryposits social actorsto be ahistorical and free floating, oblivious to the structures and power of the mediaindustry, andable to readanything theywish fromamedia text.Another relatedcrit-icism faults the theory for its excessive focus on the text–reader (viewer) relation.Grouping it with other text-based audience approaches, J. Jensen and Pauly (1997)regarded the interpretive community as a “sociologically thin” portrait of social life.Other analysts have noted how shallow this kind of community seems to be, com-pared to real communities (Lichterman, 1992; Schroder, 1994). A third major criti-cism concerns its construct validity. For example, Evans (1990) perceived the inter-pretive community to be a “postmodern epithet” for more well-marked categories ofsocial structure, such as ethnicity, economic class, and gender, that are empiricallyrelated to patterns of media-related behavior (p. 157). He concluded that the exis-

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tence of interpretive communities will remain in doubt until investigations have sys-tematically controlled for the influence of these social-structural factors.

For the most part, these critiques were written at a time when theoreticalwriting on the topic was outpacing the production of empirical work. In theconclusion to this article, the issues raised by these critics are revisited briefly. Iargue that the work completed recently, including studies that involve a religiousdimension, may have addressed, and even allayed to some degree, some of theconcerns expressed by critics of the interpretive community approach.

INTERPRETIVE COMMUNITY STUDIES:MEDIA AND RELIGIOUS INTERSECTIONS

One of the strongest tests of the value of a theory or concept is how widely it hasspread in the research community. By this measure, the interpretive concept hasbeen moderately successful, having been used in the conceptualization and designof dozens of studies. In this section, I present four categories that cover a great dealof this published output: genre communities, historical communities, institutionalcommunities, and virtual communities. These categories are not described in amutually exclusive fashion; indeed, many of the studies reviewed here could fit intotwo or more categories. However, each category is defined by a distinct researchgoal to which studies of religion and media community have contributed in recentyears.

Genre Communities

Janice Radway’s (1984b) study of romance readers, based in part on her skilled ap-propriation of Stanley Fish’s (1980) ideas about interpretive community, did morethan any other study to bring the concept to the attention of the communicationfield. Many studies have also chosen the path of selecting a media genre to locatean audience community. Radway (1984a) herself was wary of this route:

While all may read romances, they may do so differently or for different purposes.They may indeed be category readers, but they may not constitute an interpretivecommunity in the sense that they all select, use, and operate on printed texts in cer-tain socially specific ways. (p. 55)

Nevertheless, genre has been a convenient starting point for conducting re-search of audience tastes, classifications, uses, and discourses. Genres are also of in-terest because they constitute a “precise locus of struggle between identities felt [bythe audience] and identifications offered [by media producers]” (White, 1994, p.26). To cite some examples of genre community, Lindlof, Coyle, and Grodin (1998)used Q-methodology to identify what science fiction means—in terms of aesthetics,

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social practice, and textual identifiers—to frequent readers. Schaefer and Avery(1993) interviewed fans of Late Night With David Letterman to understand thegenre-breaking conventions they appreciated. Grodin (1991) and Lichterman(1992) studied readers of self-help books, and it is interesting to note that both ex-pressed skepticism about the ability of the interpretive community concept to ex-plain how readers use the ideas in these texts to understand and narrate theirself-stories.

Media fans who form themselves into subcultures are a special case of interpre-tive community, if not a different category altogether. Subcultural membershipsappear to be a species of what J. A. Anderson (1996) called the engaged audience,for whom “attendance to a text is directed as a sign of [genuine] membership” (p.88). Whereas media use for most people occurs in opportunistic fashion, the en-gaged audience is “tightly coupled in contracts of mutual dependencies. There aresolid interpersonal networks and personal histories. … Engaged audiences appearmuch more likely to participate in the production process itself” (pp. 88–89). Fanssometimes stake ownership claims to the narrative, and even elaborate on the orig-inal texts in fan fiction or songs (Jenkins, 1988). Creating and maintaining a sub-culture requires continuous group processes of sustaining an identity through thecoherence gained by a consistent point of view and a lifestyle that inscribes culturaldifference in pointed reference to mainstream codes. The key difference, then, isbetween a text that is read within the routines of a relationship (interpretive com-munity) and a text whose interpreted qualities form a basis for constructing grouplife (fan subculture).

So far, research of religious communities’ uses of specific genres or texts hasbeen scarce (although Harding, 2000, is an interesting case study of “how toread” the concatenated texts of a single figure, Jerry Falwell, from within the ten-ets of fundamentalist Christian culture). Hoover’s (1988) study of 700 Clubviewers’ perceptions in the context of their “faith histories,” is an example of oneway to frame this sort of study. As part of an ethnography of television useamong a South Asian community in London, Gillespie (1995) examined thefamily-situated uses of a “sacred soap” in video form, the Mahabharata. Certainlythere is no shortage of fans and devoted audiences for popular religious texts,ranging from the Veggie Tales video series (Hess, 2001) to the burgeoning Chris-tian pop music scene (Hendershot, 1995). As always with genre-based audienceresearch, the challenge is to go beyond the moment of reception and explore au-dience understandings in deeper historical, sociocultural terms.

Historical Communities

Audience communities of the past may be recovered through the evaluation of ar-chival records and other evidence of media uses and discourse (K. B. Jensen, 1993).To the extent that these materials are available (e.g., newspaper stories of audienceactivity, audience measurement data, letters to the editor), analysts can recon-

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struct critical moments and contours of historical reception. This research hasbeen done mostly to study shifts in public sensibility or audience routines and re-sponses after the introduction of a new or conflictive media resource. McCarthy’s(1995) study of tavern television viewing in the late 1940s and early 1950s is an ex-emplar of this line of work. She turned to newspaper accounts of television’s intro-duction in bars to reconstruct the early protocols for watching TV in public places.In another study of a transitional period, Nord (1995) analyzed the reader responseto two Chicago newspapers during 1912 through 1917, when new methods of ob-jective reporting were coming into being. The rhetoric of readers’ letters revealedthat the newspapers were read according to the strategies of politically inspired in-terpretive communities then active in Chicago.

Documentary methods have been used to track and explicate church viewsabout media (e.g., Romanowski, 1995; Stout, 1996). Like the studies cited earlier,historical reception can reveal how a crisis in the experience of audience membersunfolded. For example, in a study of response to the controversial film The LastTemptation of Christ, Lindlof (1996) analyzed all of the letters published in the let-ters-to-the-editor section of the city’s newspaper during a 7-week period in 1988.The discourse of opponents, supporters, and others revealed community-wide fis-sures about such issues as Biblical authority, Hollywood’s artistic license, the free-dom of religious expression, and the value of protest. Despite the limitations of atextual analysis of letters, the study offered a partial glimpse of the cultural war de-bates occurring in homes, churches, and other places at the time.

Institutional Communities

The interpretive community concept has also been applied to media phenomenaoutside the text–audience circuit. One prominent arena for study has been the lifeworlds of media workers, including as well the relations between media workersand other social actors (Berkowitz & TerKeurst, 1999). Zelizer (1993), for example,argued that the interpretive community concept provides a framework, beyondprofessionalism, for understanding “how journalists have ascribed to themselvesthe power of interpretation, how certain favored narratives of events are adoptedacross news organizations, and how narrative has helped reporters neutralize lesspowerful or coherent narratives of the same event” (p. 222). Zelizer’s analysis ofjournalistic discourses in the wake of the Watergate and McCarthy investigationsindicated that the earlier reportage was transformed over time into commonly ref-erenced “lessons” about how to report and how not to report. These “secondchance[s] at interpretation” (Zelizer, 1993, p. 232) seemed to produce a greaternarrative authority for journalists. Indeed, it is partly through such events thatjournalists realize who they are as a community and how to negotiate their identityand power in the larger society. This community view of mass communicator prac-tice has proven useful in studying the processes by which news of religious eventsmoves into the public sphere (e.g., Clark & Hoover, 1997).

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Another emerging area of study involves the media-interpretive practices ofchurches, denominations, and sects, and their extension into spheres of social actionand identity performance. As one example of this approach, Luthra’s (2001) study ofsatsanghis (Hindu fellowship groups) shows how members draw on certain core prin-ciples to reconcile the teachings of their faith with the leisure world of media. Com-munication analysts also focus on the role of religious authority in decisions aboutmedia within, across, and through organizational boundaries. To illustrate, Taylor(1999) used the interpretive community as a theoretic device to study how organiza-tional identitiesareevokedbythetextual resources thatahostculturecirculates.Hisethnography focused on Deseret Book, a publishing and retail company owned byTheChurchof JesusChristofLatter-DaySaints,whicharguablyplaysa role in there-production of Mormon cultural norms. Among the themes developed in the study,Taylor found that Deseret Book’s management of textual controversy tapped ten-sions faced by a conservative religion when it encourages individual members tomake their own decisions about appropriate cultural materials at the same time thatit promotes “unofficial,” generic criteria. Quite clearly, there are a great many sites insociety, suchaschildcarecenters (Seiter, 1999), inwhich religiouscommunitycodesdisperse and inform decisions about television and other media.

Virtual Communities

The rapid rise of computer networks has provided unique resources for people towork, play, and converse. The World Wide Web, browsers, and search engines allcombine to give the most technically unsophisticated of users the ability to find in-formation on almost any subject. Software tools have also progressed to the pointthat Web sites can be designed and produced by almost anyone, regardless of train-ing or experience. Other communication utilities of the Internet—for example,Internet Relay Chat (IRC), news groups, electronic mail, and instant messagingservices—enable people to exchange messages and forge relationships with othersacross the globe with similar interests. When these nodes of communication be-come dense and relatively long lasting, they are called virtual communities (Smith& Kollock, 1999). What is meant by virtual is that networked interactions are com-munities “‘in effect,’ a surrogate” (Smith, 1993, p. 5). That is, disembodied rela-tionships are carried out as if they were a community in the usual sense.

The growth of this parallel world means that nearly all communication researchproblems now have their cyberspace versions—as well as a set of research questionsinflected by qualities of the virtual. For example, if people make their own signifi-cance of media commodities (as the interpretive community theory allows), thenwhat happens when those practices occur in computer networks? What is the natureof popular culture community on the Internet? How does media content on the Webbecome a semiotic platform for the audience’s own texts (discourse about the con-tent)? What complicates these questions is that we still have only a rudimentary un-derstanding of how the Internet influences human communication. For example, we

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know that Internet news group interactions are typically asynchronous (responsesare staggered in time), acorporal (absence of bodily presence), and anonymous as tothe participants’ physical and socially or culturally marked attributes. However, asstudies of news group communities indicate (Lindlof & Shatzer, 1998), we are onlystarting to learn how these features affect such aspects as the coming and going ofmembers,howtheyknowthe identityof theothermembers (andwhether thisalwaysmatters), and how a virtual community conducts itself in such vital areas as resolvingconflicts and deciding the things that are of importance to its membership.

Naturally, these and other questions about the transformation of experience invirtual space—and the excitement that goes with pursuing the answers—apply aswell to the study of religious culture. Churches promote and extend their serviceson Web pages; list serves and news groups conduct discussions of theological issues;individuals post their thoughts, prayers, and reactions, and consult the reactions ofothers in archived message threads; and sect community building goes on belowthe public radar in e-mails and restricted IRCs. However, religious interlocutorsmay also find the Internet amenable to purposes that are uniquely theirs. Miracu-lous events can be reproduced on Web sites, detached from their local scenes ofappearance, and become symbols of the supernatural to audiences worldwide(Vasquez & Marquardt, 2000). In contrast to historical precedent, a “virtual pil-grimage” (pp. 128–129) overcomes legal and physical barriers to allow believers toapproach and commune with the miracle. Computer networks may also fostermodes of use around metaphysical topics that actually encourage an inauthentic oruncommitted involvement. O’Leary (1996) began exploring CompuServe “confer-ence rooms” dedicated to religion discussion. He became attracted to a neopagangroup that not only transacted discussions among group leaders, members, and vis-itors, but also performed rituals online. O’Leary’s analysis of the performative lan-guage from the group’s archived transcripts led him to conclude:

Rooted in textuality, ritual action in cyberspace is constantly faced with evidence ofits own quality as constructed, as arbitrary, and as artificial, a game played with nomaterial stakes or consequences; but the efficacy of ritual is affirmed, time and timeagain, even in the face of a full, self-conscious awareness of its artificiality. (p. 804)

The two cases just cited—one, a premodern charismatic experience joined to aglobalization project; the other, rites of a new-age religious sect offered to membersand casual visitors alike—illustrate that the production of virtual religious commu-nity may not be so different from its secular counterparts. The issues are familiarones of locality–globalization, authenticity–artificiality, and trust–disbelief. Evenin less exotic cases, online religious action may have as much potential to alienateand inflame (Kester, 1995) as to inspire, inform, and find common ground amongpeople. Perhaps the most consequential future studies will be those that interrelatethe texts of online spiritual action with offline social institutions, and thus attemptto achieve a holistic understanding of how religious communities communicate.

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FUTURE DIRECTIONS

The launch of a journal is always an optimistic event. Obviously, a new journalgives authors another venue in which to publish, particularly for those whose workaligns with the journal’s mission. However, even more than that, a well-conceivedjournal can be a significant intervention—welcoming new voices; broadening theterrain of ideas; forging exciting connections between disciplines, and between theacademy and the practice community. Hopefully, the Journal of Media and Religionwill stand at the forefront of new directions in theory, research, and method in me-dia and religion. Interpretive community research is only one among many ap-proaches represented in the Journal of Media and Religion; but if past is prologue, itshould be a vibrant field of activity.

Several issues of research focus and practice with respect to interpretive commu-nity study need to be addressed in the future. First, with respect to methodology,qualitative designs and techniques have been used frequently in studies of interpre-tive communities. These choices are justified in most cases, given theepistemological premises. Interviews of many types (structured, unstructured, focusgroups)areemployed inmostof thesestudies,producingvaluabledatawhenananal-ysis of discourse (stories, accounts, life histories) is called for. On the other hand, in-terviews are not well-suited for learning about how communities are constituted orchanged, how people actually behave in community, and how they perform their au-dience or media-worker selves. There is a compelling need for studies of interpretivecommunity action that are grounded in long-term participant observation. The ef-fort of doing ethnography is always large, and entry into these communities can testthe ability of ethnographers (especially those who do not personally accept the be-liefs of the host group) to create an effective role in the research scene, and to do so inan authentic, ethical relation with the membership (Ammerman, 1987). However,the results would undoubtedly reduce, if not resolve, many of the theoretic ambigu-ities of audience interpretation. They would also deepen our understandings of spe-cific faith communities and their interactions with media texts and technology.Finally, communication researchers should not ignore recent advances in quantita-tive techniques, such as semantic network analysis, for analyzing religious meaningsand social practices and developing theory (Grant, 2001).

On the conceptual horizon, in addition to the ideas already mentioned in thisarticle, the field would benefit from a stronger focus on the processes by which stra-tegic influence spreads within, and flows out of, an interpretive community. Themembers of these communities, J. A. Anderson (1996) remarked, “are not equiva-lent units as the normal political processes of membership are presumed. Somemembers are clearly more important than others directing the others to both whatto ‘read’ and how to read it” (p. 87). The study of member relationships would helpus understand the occurrence of contradictory or conflictive modes of interpreta-tion, which often arise when new or discordant media move into or among religiouscultures. Because these strategies of interpretive community travel along complex

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routes and unfold in social scenes dispersed in time and space, researchers will needto become more sensitive to the multiple vernaculars employed in and out ofchurch settings (Primiano, 1995) and be prepared to deploy several levels of datacapture (Marcus, 1995).

Many of the issues raised previously by critics now appear less damaging to thecase of interpretive community research. We now have studies—Gillespie (1995)is an outstanding example—that document the embedding of media-use routinesin historical, social, and cultural contexts. Few, if any, researchers claim that read-ers are not influenced by the ways in which content is organized or distributed.Few, also, would dispute that the media industry is powerfully engaged in shapingperceptions of their products. However, this shaping effect is neither given nor in-evitable. We now know that media use does not lie thinly at the surface of everydaylife, but penetrates in subtle ways to the very constitution of social lives. We nowhave evidence that media use does not always coincide predictably with social cat-egories of class, gender, or race, or even religious affiliation (e.g., Mears & Ellison,2000)—although further research would help to delineate the relations. Now morethan ever, the study of the social audience is a key ingredient in any theory of me-dia. The interpretive community approach is a promising route to explaining thisaudience in its religious dimensions.

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